Marilyn Pemberton’s edited collection of nineteenth-century moral fairy tales
sits loosely within the tradition of Nina Auerbach’s and U.C. Knoepflmacher’s
seminal study, Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Victorian
Women Writers (1992). However, while the latter positions its selected tales
within a discursive framework, with discrete sections offering analyses of each
of the subsequent stories, Pemberton’s relies primarily on its lengthy introduction
to explain the nuances of many of her recovered tales. Her focus for the collection
is on these tales as initiators and/or reflections of what was perceived as
appropriate – or inappropriate – behaviour for men, women and children during the
Victorian period.

Spanning a publication period of 1818 to 1899, and opening with a poem by Edith
Nesbit, ‘A Cinderella’, published in The Girl’s Own Paper in 1893, this
collection of twenty stories is arranged chronologically; some were written for
children and others for an older readership (as evidenced by their original place
of publication). Tales by well-known authors, such as Mary Louisa Molesworth and
Nesbit, are joined by those from anonymous writers, and the selection is drawn from
a multiplicity of sources; for example, the playlet ‘Magnus and Morna: A Shetland
Fairy Tale’ by Dinah Mulock Craik was published in November 1876 in Harper’s
New Monthly Magazine, while ‘The Dwarf’s Hill’ by an unknown author is from
Aunt Judy’s Magazine of October 1881. Pemberton’s rationale for her
eclectic choice is that “[t]he stories in this collection document and reflect the
use of fairy tales as one of the many ways emerging values can be explained and
instilled in both adults and children” (10). Her focus for these emergent values
is the family, which, as she points out, functioned to encourage the various
behaviours that were deemed appropriate during the period.

In her informative introductory essay, Pemberton reviews the various scholarly
discourses surrounding the identification of the fairy tale, favouring Swann Jones’
emphasis on magic as a less than unusual phenomenon, before moving on to discuss
the evolution of the family unit, an ambitious project, given the length of the
essay. However, there is much to inform readers who are not fully conversant with
the shifting ideologies of family and gender that marked the nineteenth-century,
and Pemberton frequently returns to her central discussion of fairy tales to
examine how the popularity and form of such stories was displayed within her
period as different ideologies of behaviour emerged. It may be that this initial
discussion on the family unit is a little too chronologically extensive, beginning
as it does with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although this breadth
allows Pemberton to demonstrate that the ideologies inherent to her chosen fairy
tales were evident prior to their publication. For example, she usefully identifies
potential Wollstonecraft influences in S.G.’s ‘Aglae: A Fairy Tale’, published
in 1821. This is a story of a beautiful princess who learns, through fairy aid
and exposure to a group of old women, that character is more important than
fleeting beauty. Locating this story in the context of nineteenth-century tales
is fruitful. Mary Sherwood’s ‘The Wishing Cap’ (1824) celebrates little orphan
Charles who, while his peers wish for a rocking horse, whip and dress, wishes
only for God’s blessing. In what might be characterised as archetypal Sherwood
style, Charles consequently dies happily because he has achieved grace. Mrs
Sherwood’s story is not a fairy tale, as Pemberton comments, but its clear
Evangelical message is unusually presented; it displays, states Pemberton, the
“common fairy tale device of the wish” (81). Towards the end of the century,
fairy tales such as Molesworth’s ‘The Three Wishes’ (1898) demonstrate the ability
of women to survive without male support, as indeed Molesworth herself was obliged
to do. However, and as Pemberton suggests, the trajectory towards equality was
still in its infancy at the end of the century; the era of the New Woman may have
been approaching, but fairy tales encouraging the “proper” female behaviour were
still being written (52).

Pemberton’s Enchanted Ideologies is an informative publication,
inasmuch as recovery of forgotten or overlooked tales, particularly those by women
writers, remains an important task if scholars are to comprehend the broad spectrum
of literary influences that existed within the Victorian period. Yet Pemberton’s
research might have been more fully exploited and her rationale more finely honed.
Some discussion of the many other tales that, presumably, must have been explored
would be welcome, as would an explanation as to why these particular stories were
chosen. There are, undoubtedly, many more unknown fairy tales to be read and,
while Pemberton does indicate further reading in her footnotes on occasions,
these tend to be references to more well-known texts. Furthermore, the intended
reader of this book remains unclear Children’s Literature scholars are likely to
be familiar with much of the introductory discussion of early texts and ideologies
of the family and, while gender issues are prominent in the Introduction, the
emphasis is not fully on representations of women. Neither is there a focus on
women’s writing; several authors are anonymous and Ascott R. Hope (‘Humpty Dumpty’,
1877) is a male writer. In addition, the absence of a focused critical analysis
of each of the selected stories, other than that raised relatively briefly in
the Introduction, undermines any true sense of scholarship.

However, there are useful appendices suggesting further reading and briefly
detailing biographical information about some of the authors, with lists of their
work, although these are not always fully cited, and very scant details are
offered on other authors. Mary Senior Clark (‘The Ivory Harp’, 1875) is accompanied
only by her dates and a list of two of her children’s books, while Alice Corkran,
author of ‘Wish-Day’ (1883), is similarly restricted to a list of five of her
books. Nesbit and Sherwood, about whom much is already known, are granted more
extensive biographical detail. While Pemberton’s book offers an unusual selection
of stories that will undoubtedly be of interest to researchers of Victorian fairy
tales, there is a sense, overall, that a more significant publication might have
been produced.